After kicking off their North American tour in New Orleans last month, The Cure descended upon NYC on Tuesday night (6/20) for the first show of a three-night run at Madison Square Garden. It marked their first time playing NYC (and MSG) in exactly seven years, and their first time here since the promise of their first new album since 2008 has started to seem realer than ever. If you’ve peeked at the setlists they’ve been playing on this tour and/or last year’s Europe/UK run, then you know the ‘Shows of a Lost World Tour’ is not about running through 90 minutes of hits. Their nearly-three-hour, 29-song set began at 9:12 PM and finished shortly before midnight. It technically had two encores, but it really felt like the main set and first encore was one complete set, and then they returned for a second portion of the night, a celebratory coda filled with a chunk of their greatest hits. Both portions of the night were equally rewarding in their own very different ways.
They opened the first portion of the show with a new song and played six new songs total, five of which made their live debuts in the past year, as well as “It Can Never Be the Same,” which has been in The Cure’s repertoire since the 2016 tour and also appeared on the live album Curaetion-25: From There To Here From Here To There. Aside from two Disintegration fan faves early on (“Pictures of You” and “Lovesong”), The Cure stuck to deeper cuts from 1985’s The Head on the Door and 1980’s Seventeen Seconds, and mixed in stuff like the title track of their 1979 debut LP Three Imaginary Boys, “Shake Dog Shake” from their psychedelic 1984 record The Top, Wish‘s eight-minute vibe-out “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea,” and “Burn” from the soundtrack of 1994’s The Crow, a song that wasn’t played live at all until nearly 20 years after its release but which has since become a thunderous highlight of their live sets.
The whole set felt very intentional and very artistic, with sequences and song choices that geared towards creating a specific vibe, not necessarily towards inciting crowd singalongs. The new songs all sound genuinely great, and they worked perfectly next to the band’s ’80s material. Robert Smith & co. — veteran Cure bassist Simon Gallup; longtime members Roger O’Donnell (keyboards), Perry Bamonte (keys, guitars), and Jason Cooper (drums); and guitarist Reeves Gabrels (formerly of David Bowie’s band Tin Machine) — still know how to capture the same otherworldly sounds that this band began crafting over 40 years ago, and Robert’s voice sounds as strong and iconic as ever. The show gives me hope that a new album from The Cure will be worth the wait, and it also served as a reminder that there’s no band in the world like this one. No band emerged out of goth and post-punk and went on to master pop perfection and go off on psychedelic trips the way this band does. They’re still so timeless, they bring people from all different walks of life together, and it feels like they’re one of the biggest cult bands in the world. They do have the hits portion, but it’s hard to think of many bands that can pack out three-night arena runs and then play two hours of moody deep cuts and unreleased songs while keeping the crowd entranced.
When they did return for that hits portion, they were nearing midnight on a work and school night, but that didn’t stop the thousands of fans in Madison Square Garden from dancing and singing along to “Friday I’m In Love,” “Close to Me,” “In Between Days,” “Just Like Heaven,” “Boys Don’t Cry,” and other eternal classics. It was a thrilling, rewarding, and flat-out fun end to a very special night.
The show was opened by The Cure’s longtime friends/tourmates The Twilight Sad, who paid tribute to one of their other longtime friends, the late Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit, by covering “Keep Yourself Warm.”
The Cure’s MSG run continues tonight (6/21) and tomorrow (6/22). More pictures by P Squared, some fan-shot videos, and The Cure’s full setlist below…
The Cure @ MSG – 6/20/23 Setlist
Alone
Pictures of You
A Fragile Thing
Kyoto Song
A Night Like This
Lovesong
And Nothing Is Forever
Three Imaginary Boys
Burn
Push
Play for Today
A Forest
Shake Dog Shake
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
Endsong
Encore 1:
I Can Never Say Goodbye
It Can Never Be the Same
At Night
Plainsong
Disintegration
Encore 2:
Lullaby
Six Different Ways
The Walk
Friday I’m in Love
Close to Me
Why Can’t I Be You?
In Between Days
Just Like Heaven
Boys Don’t Cry